Photographer Jeff Winterberg
interview July 2004 with George Chen
All photos herein from JeffWinterberg.com
I first met Jeff Winterberg in the Spring of 2000 at a US Maple show.
He had his camera that night, and at many other New York shows in the year to follow. I learned that he'd been shooting since the early '90s, capturing the West Coast scene while touring in Antioch Arrow. Jeff currently plays in the band Coptic Light and has documented the most interesting American underground bands of the time with his book, Rat-a-tat-tat Birds: Photographs 1991-2003 (Volumeone 2004).
We met up on a sunny afternoon in Oakland to compare notes and add context to what was going in both worlds, bridging the East and West Coasts. An edited version of this interview ran in the Fall 2004 issue of Tokion.
Zum: I ran into Mac Mann recently and asked him what to ask you about, and he said to ask you about Punishment.
JW: Punishment was a San Diego band that was these really young kids. I don't know how to explain it beyond their set was this one song that was about three notes, the point of the set was more to just annoy the hell out of people. They would blow things up and smoke cigars. I think the last time they ever played - there's a sequence of it in the book -we played in a little basement and this guy Nate who put the show on saw them play with us once and asked them to come back. We had them headline, and Andy Ward the guitar player for Antioch Arrow and Aaron Montaigne who sang, set off a fire extinguisher when all these punkers were moshing. Naked Aggression played the show. It was this little tiny basement and Andy was throwing records. Their shows were really chaotic - it's hard to really explain it but they were really clever in the way they annoyed people, they had a really good finger on the pulse of what would annoy uptight hardcore kids at the time. It just worked really perfectly...If you weren't too uptight you'd end up laughing the entire time basically because it was really well done, they were really good at annoying people.
Hardcore was very humorless back then, the whole scene was very humorless. I think people took everything the wrong way, most of the people I knew had a very good sense of humor about things.
Zum: I wasn't into standard punk at the time either, which seemed humorless, but the entire scene from Gravity Records was pushing boundaries beyond what people were used to.
JW: It wasn't really contrived like that either, San Diego was just so isolated culturally and looked down upon by LA that people were very into being independent about things. They liked to think of themselves as their own scene and not an outgrowth of LA, because it was culturally and geographically isolated. Even to this day a lot of really far out people doing like - a band like Physics would be a good example, really into doing their own thing.
Zum: In the book you've got a bunch of stuff from being on tour in that period and a lot of bands that would never be in a book ever.
JW: It's kind of whatever piqued my interest. There were plenty of bands that were bigger that I either didn't take pictures of because I didn't really like them or just never got around to it. Sometimes it's just the band's not very dynamic, but there were certain bands that I really wanted to capture, Punishment is an example where I knew they would never be big but I really wanted - they were incredibly photogenic. It was good to get something like that down and immortalize it somehow.
Zum: What is your operate when you try to get live shots?
JW: It can be really contextual. Certain bands, there's somebody in the band that your eye naturally gravitates towards. It's the worst when it's the drummer because it's usually impossible to get near the drummer unless you're at a very small show. I usually try and narrow it down like that, figure out which side of the stage I want to be near by virtue of who's going to be standing there and kind of take it from there. I don't really have a set way of going about it really. I usually use flash but I was trying to do stuff without it, just push my film a lot in the past year or so.
Zum: Since it's not from assignments, you're actually interested in the people that you're shooting. people that you either know or have some affinity towards.
JW: Hopefully what comes across would be it's a very personal thing. I do have a lot affection for most of the bands that are in there. Music's something that has always been really important to me; I don't think it would come out very well if I didn't have something invested in the band.
Zum: What was the story with the Iggy Pop photo, did you just run into him?
JW: That was for Skyscraper magazine. He's a nice dude too, he's somebody who could turn out to be a total asshole and people would still kiss his butt. He's a little intense but he was very polite and courteous. It could have gone either way, I knew he could be really nice or a little shit.
John Zorn was a total shit. I went to a show to take pictures, he was playing with Yamatsuka Eye from Boredoms and I really only wanted pictures of eye, but John Zorn threw a fit about me just holding my camera there. I tried to politely find out whether he didn't want any pictures or no flash pictures or whatever and he was just not nice at all about it. This was before he was even started; he just walked up and yelled at me about it. I almost walked out but I desperately wanted a picture of Eye, so I just waited till afterward and asked if I could take a portrait. It's one of the few times I've ever been very starstruck.
Zum: It's good that you have this relationship with Matt Owens, who put out the Coptic Light 7" and the book on Volumeone.
JW: He's an amazing person to deal with, I don't know where he gets his energy. He gets more shit done than anybody I've ever known. I thought of doing one (a book) in 1994 and decided not only did I not have enough money; I didn't really have enough pictures. When I moved to New York, in early 2000 I met up with him. He and his brother Mark had put on a show for us in '94 so we just talked again. He asked if I was still taking photos, I told him I'd been thinking about doing a book for a while and he said, "Well we should start talking about it." The idea sat around for a while. It took three plus years to actually get done.
Zum: It seems like music picked up in those three years, there was a lot of stuff going on.
JW: There's a lot of stuff - I wish I'd gotten it done faster, but there were a lot of photos I wouldn't have been able to put in the book, that Animal Collective one in the park for instance.
Zum: Having a decade to work with it's interesting to see the other music scene emerge that has weird connections to the first half...
JW: I think the two scenes are actually kind of analogous. If you look in the book, I've been taking photos the entire time since I started in '91.
Zum: There's a couple of repeat people, like Mick Barr (Crom-Tech and Orthrelm) who's in the early part and also in the later part.
JW: Yeah, he's I guess mid to late 90s is when I met him. There are definitely repeats. I never got photos of Born Against, but Men's Recovery Project is in there. He (Sam McPheeters) is somebody I've always liked to deal with. I think there are a lot people who have been putting stuff out and making things for all this time that most people don't really realize how much stuff they've actually done.
I sort of realize that early '90s now has become really mythic to a lot of people in the way that early '80s punk and hardcore scene was to me in a lot of ways. It's a lot easier to take photos now, cause of digital and things like that. for better or for worse, since the mid '90s on the whole entire world has almost been over documented. I never think that what we do is gonna be rarified to anybody because there's so much over documentation of it.
Zum: About the early '90s mythology, a lot of the bands - you'll see it on eBay and some kid will be bidding like $30 on some 7" that was screened on a paper bag. The fact that it was kind of willfully obscure makes it seem powerful in a way.
JW: It's like any time period; there were a lot of crappy things in that time period too. There was really good stuff and things that were important to me and there were other things I found really distasteful back then too, and bands that were within that same scene or even friends of mine, I wouldn't really document it because of that.
I think what I really wanted to convey with the book is I wanted it to be really personal and I wanted it to be more about what was going on in my head rather than "this is what this scene was like." It's supposed to be more my take on it, if that's marketable or not.
Zum: Are there any Crash Worship photos?
JW: It's embarrassing but I was afraid to bring my camera for a while to their shows. I finally brought one to a show they did in DC when they entered a time where they got a little more tame and the whole thing felt a little more friendly.
That was a band I really wish I'd been able to document, I should have just brought a throw away camera.
I saw them play one time for about 6 hours straight and it was at the Ché Café. They had the fire and water, dumping wine on people. They brought out this naked girl on a palette of fruit and everyone had an orgy in the fruit. There were naked people fucking on the floor during the show, they had noise complaints from 2 miles away and the cops were standing on the hill just watching it, they wouldn't come down there. Another time they didn't actually play, I was going to the show and it was before they even went on and there were 14 cop cars and a helicopter breaking the show up. It was during Doo Rag who were pretty mellow. They had such a reputation about them that they couldn't even go near a show in San Diego. There's a lot of crash worship stories, they were sort of like the more serious and well thought out version of Punishment; Punishment was like a very immediate kids version of that.
Zum: That segue ways into something I was gonna ask, I was thinking how it was neat to have a book where you can see a lot of the audience members. Mac said, (something like) yeah, I think there's an inordinate amount of people in that book where they would have been thirty but they died young.
JW: There aren't a whole lot of people I know of in that book who are dead, as far as - Denver, there are a couple of Powerdresser pictures, that was one of the big ones.
Zum: It just seemed like a lot of people in that scene early on got pretty heavy into drugs.
JW: there was a lot of that but luckily I left San Diego- I didn't see it so it's always been depressing to me but I was very removed from it so I wasn't quite as affected by it as someone living there who had to sit through the whole thing. I can't think of a whole lot of people in the audiences; he's probably right but I just haven't kept up. I know a few - Scott from Karp and the Whip, he died last year, Ryan, Denver... there's one other I can't think of.
Zum: Maybe it's not as bad as like Please Kill Me or something.
JW: I don't know if San Diego would be any worse than any of those scenes if you looked at the numbers. I could be totally wrong. I did make a conscious effort to divest myself from a certain amount of the hardcore scene. I just sort of dropped out and was incognito for a while. I was an auto mechanic in Richmond for four years. I think it helped me sort of become unconnected with that, have a detachment about it maybe. I still have a lot of affection for that time period, but my head is completely in a very much different space now than it was when I was 23 years old. I always found it helped to live in different places, to not be stuck in one area geographically.
The only difference I've seen, in New York I've found a lot of people are able to really stretch out, it's a city that although it's prohibitively expensive to have a practice space and get your stuff to shows, the opportunities you have to actually do things and see things are far beyond any other city. You can almost do it with a certain anonymity as well, which is why I think it's so good. There's an energy about it I guess, which sounds really corny.
Zum: Any last thoughts?
JW: Sailor is my dog, he's the best. Kaori is the best also. Just mention Kaori somewhere. The whole book's dedicated to Sailor.
END
Last updated November 26, 2004. [ edit this page ]